Headlines

Nigeria’s finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, has resigned following allegations that she used a forged certificate to avoid participating in the country’s mandatory year of youth service, the Financial Times reported. President Muhammadu Buhari accepted her resignation and appointed Zainab Ahmed, minister of state budget and national planning, to oversee the finance ministry in Africa’s largest economy.

Argentina’s economy minister is to present austerity-driven budget measures to congress on Monday as the country tries to shore up support from the IMF and calm investors after a plunge in the value of the peso, the Financial Times reported. Allies of President Mauricio Macri said they were confident the plans would be backed, including by some moderates in the opposition. The president hopes to restore market confidence in his wounded administration after renewed currency volatility. The peso has fallen 20 per cent since late August.

Italian nativist politician Matteo Salvini, whose popularity has surged since he became interior minister in June, has hit his first setback. His anti-immigration League party faces possible bankruptcy from a penalty assessed for past corruption. Mr. Salvini’s governing partners, the anticorruption 5 Star Movement, have pressed him in recent days to comply with a court ruling last week that the League must repay €49 million ($57 million) of public funding for election costs stretching back a decade, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Deutsche Bank AG is weighing a move to split its core businesses under a holding company, a measure that would make it easier to break up in a crisis and more agile in potential mergers, according to people with knowledge of the discussions, Bloomberg News reported. The bank has been encouraged by regulators to adopt the structure, which could create three largely independent core divisions overseen by common management, the people said, asking not to be identified as the deliberations are private.

Chinese companies’ debt-servicing firepower has slumped to a three-year low even as authorities move to support their financing, showcasing the difficulty of getting stimulus through to the real economy, Bloomberg News reported. Listed nonfinancial companies had cash and equivalents to cover only 81 percent of debt due in the coming year, the worst since 2015 -- when China was battling hard-landing fears -- data compiled by Bloomberg show. Materials, utilities and energy sectors are particularly vulnerable as their cash levels were at about half of short-term obligations.

One of the most successful traders ever in the Nordic power market has been barred from trading on Nasdaq Inc. after massive losses at the start of this week. Einar Aas, who’s been active in the market for about two decades, had taken on a position that was too big in relation to the liquidity in the market, Dagens Naeringsliv reported, citing a statement from Aas. After “extraordinary price changes,” in the Nordic and German contracts he was forced to pay the exchange his last free liquid funds, Bloomberg News reported. That wasn’t enough and on Tuesday he was put under administration.

Chinese aviation-to-finance conglomerate HNA defaulted on a Rmb300m ($44m) loan raised through a trust company, the lender said on Thursday as it sought to freeze HNA assets, the Financial Times reported. The announcement by Hunan Trust is a sign that HNA’s liquidity woes are beginning to have a broader impact outside China’s formal banking sector. The company is already under strict supervision by a group of bank creditors, led by China Development Bank, following a liquidity crunch in the final quarter of last year.

The European Central Bank is set to wind down the most important part of its crisis-era stimulus at the end of the year after Mario Draghi delivered an upbeat economic assessment despite risks from trade wars and emerging markets, the Financial Times reported. The ECB confirmed that it would slow the expansion of its quantitative easing programme, reducing monthly bond purchases from €30bn to €15bn from October until the end of the year. It also looks increasingly likely to halt new purchases under the €2.5tn programme in December.

Malaysian Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said on Thursday that the Southeast Asian country can sustain 5 percent annual economic growth as its new administration reviews mega projects and copes with hefty debts left by the previous government, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. In August, Malaysia cut its 2018 growth forecast to 5 percent, from 5.5-6.0 percent and reported much slower second-quarter expansion of 4.5 percent, compared to the previous period's 5.4 percent.

The European Central Bank pushed forward Thursday with its plan to gradually phase out its monetary stimulus, saying it is confident in the region's growth. But its president, Mario Draghi, warned that the United States' trade dispute with several major powers has become a key economic concern, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. The chief monetary authority for the 19 countries that use the euro confirmed Thursday that its bond-buying stimulus would be cut to 15 billion euros ($17.4 billion) a month from 30 billion euros after September.